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doi: 1 0. 1 0 1 7/S000964070999028X A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America. By John A. D'Elia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xxviii -f 274 pp. $45.00 cloth.
The situation is familiar. A man - a faithful man - spends much of his life on a quest to explain himself and to show the world the meaty substance to his intellectual struggles. He writes and writes and writes, grappling along the way wim condescending peers, departmental brouhaha, denominational provincialism, financial trials, irritating children, and an unloving wife. Through it all, he persists, dreaming of the day when his book, his magnum opus, makes it clear: he has the answer. And once the world sees that he has the answer, his life - his motley, muddy little life - will be redeemed. And maybe too his subject will be saved from the dustbin, placed now by his genius at the center of every conference panel, journal forum, and dissertation prospectus.
Because the man and his fantasy are familiar, you can guess how it ends. Watching from a distance, you wish you could stop the carnage before it begins, grabbing the hand of the faithful man and directing him inward (to his church, his employer, or his home) rather than relentlessly, obsessively outward to the phantom of academic celebrity. Because the book will never do the thing he wants, because books (like children, like parishioners, like students) are uncontrollable beyond your clenching stare. They will be reviewed...